Season of Saturdays by Michael Weinreb

Author:Michael Weinreb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

November 30, 1985

In the Air Tonight

Discussion Topics: Jim Kelly • Howard Schnellenberger • Jimmy Johnson • Sonny Crockett • Reaganomics • The 1987 Fiesta Bowl • Red Dawn • Southern Methodist University • Wide Right I • Bobby Bowden • 2 Live Crew • Insurrection

I.

I can recall the very moment that the Miami Hurricanes became a threat to the social order of college football: It was 1981, and I was nine years old, and it was Halloween. We were hustling door-to-door in packs, dressed up as fedora-wearing archaeologists and flannel-bedecked moonshine runners and mini Brent Musburgers, 1 thrusting outstretched pillowcases at the waists of neighbors toting bowls of Hershey’s miniatures. And in the process of soliciting, we would also inquire as to the score. No one needed to be told what score; it was a Saturday night in State College, Pennsylvania, and Penn State was ranked No. 1 in the nation, playing on the road at Miami. In any other circumstance, I would have been at home watching the game on television or listening on the radio 2; it was a matter of the serious business of football versus the frivolity of childhood, and in that moment, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I opted to go looking for Mr. Goodbar.

History tells me there were thirty-two thousand people in the Orange Bowl that night, amid a driving rainstorm. The home team’s quarterback was Jim Kelly, a junior from a small Pennsylvania town who would go on to the Pro Football Hall of Fame; Joe Paterno, the Penn State coach, had attempted to recruit him as a linebacker, which, in retrospect, might have been a mistake. The Hurricanes had gone 42-67 throughout the 1970s, and they’d never finished better than 6-5 in the decade. Their program was moribund and underfunded, their facilities so laughably terrible that they avoided giving tours to their own recruits. And then in came a mustachioed Bear Bryant disciple named Howard Schnel lenberger, who was only forty-four in 1981 but smoked a pipe and wore a jacket and tie in the July heat and looked like a veteran of the Spanish-American War.

Miami had defeated a mediocre Penn State team in 1979 on the road, but this was different. This was a Penn State team with Todd Blackledge at quarterback and Curt Warner at running back, a Penn State team with legitimate national championship aspirations. The night before the game, speaking to Sports Illustrated ’s William Nack, Schnellenberger said, “I took this job with the idea of building a national champion.” He said he hoped Miami’s athletic program would someday compare with those of Southern Cal and Notre Dame and Penn State; he said if Miami could pull out a victory, the country would know the Hurricanes were for real.

And so at one of the last houses of the night, pillowcases sagging, oversized costumes slipping down to our shoes, we were told the final score: Miami 17, Penn State 14.

Things accelerated quickly after that. Two years later,

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